In the rapidly-evolving competitive marketplace, data is among an organization's most valuable assets. Business success demands access to data and information, and the ability to quickly and seamlessly distribute data throughout the enterprise to support business process requirements. Organizations must extract, refine, manipulate, transform, integrate and distribute data in formats suitable for strategic decision-making. This poses a unique challenge in heterogeneous environments, where data is housed on disparate platforms in any number of different formats and used in many different contexts.